Cloudmark Security Blog

Tag Archives: turing test

Most social networks and other free Internet services have some sort of verification in their sign up process to make sure that a real person is signing up, and not a bot. Spammers and other cyber criminals wishing to abuse the service will attempt to automate this process so that they can sign up for […]

I was watching an excellent presentation by Rob Ragan and Oscar Salazar when I realized that I hate free stuff. Not of course the free stuff that I use, I’m fine with that. It’s all the free stuff that spammers and other cyber criminals exploit that ticks me off. Let me explain what Ragan and […]

Sometimes I love my job. How cool is it to run a Turing Test for real? But first, the back story… For a while now we’ve been receiving SMS spam reports for a three stage attack. This starts with an SMS text message conversation, moves to Yahoo! Messenger or Skype and ends up on the […]

My alma mater, Cambridge University, has made significant contributions to military intelligence over the years. Cambridge graduate Alan Turing helped to break the Enigma code, and during and after WWII a group of Cambridge graduates acting as sleeper agents performed one of the must successful infiltrations of an intelligence agency ever. Unfortunately they infiltrated British […]

I’ve just got back from the largest annual gatherings of computer security experts and hackers in the world. Running one after the other in Las Vegas are the Black Hat and Def Con conventions. Black Hat is a corporate event, with a vendor room featuring all the big names in computer security. Def Con is […]